Garden Railway Forum

The time has come to bite the bullet and make a building for the railway.  As the CLR is a light railway, wiggly-tin is the order of the day.  A random look around at the local big box hardware produced some quarter-inch poplar square section and Gorilla Glue. Various cans will provide the wiggly tin.  After that I am a bit lost as to how to proceed.  

I have come up with a building that is very largely based on Killingholme on the old Barton & Immingham Light which had a booking/parcels/stationmaster's office and a small open waiting room.  Instinct suggests make a wooden frame and lather well in preservative then line out the office with modeller's plywood (supposedly marine), suitably scribed to represent T&G then apply wiggly-tin to the outside.  Other than that I am open to suggestions being a bit unsure what will survive in the garden.  I am assuming that being reasonably waterproof is the key to success.

The rest of the "Middleham" station buildings will be an old SG van body and a loo of some description.

Coverdale will have to be a bit fancier, being the terminus.  I am thinking small and brick.

Any thoughts/suggestions?

Thank you,
Peter in AZ

How do you glue a gorilla down??

In answer to you question - Very quietly lest he awake!

Gorilla Glue is the local cheapo waterproof stuff used by carpenters and it seems to stand up OK in our climate. I would be inclined to use boat building glues, but they are not exactly easy to get hold of in the desert. What I have to cope with here is a -20C to +40C temperature range, and the occasional downpour or snow. I do not have to contend with the semi-permanent damp of the UK.

Cracking the art of constructing the 16mm scale corrugated iron shed is important because of the 'architectural' proclivities of the CLR. The track, locomotives, and rolling sock may be pretty substantial, but if all a station needs is a shed, then a shed is what it gets - there's no gelt to spend on luxuries.

Peter in AZ

Hello,

I haven't tried it yet (I will!) so I'm not writing from experience, but my plan for WHR-style corrugated shelters is to clad simple but well-preserved wooden structures with either real corrugated metal or a plastic substitute.

On the bits where you can see the inside (the open shelter bits) I plan to similarly clad the inner wall and then add false framing - the real strength will come from the wooden shell concealed inside. The idea is that the extra however many mils won't be readily apparent. The subterfuge will be most obvious when it comes to windows, but I reckon if they sit on the outside the oversized sill won't be too obcvious from inside...

Good luck with it,

Andrew.